This study has sought to examine the extent of substance abuse at schools in the Buffalo Flats area of East London, South Africa, with relation to gender, age and grade of learners. A cross-sectional descriptive quantitative design was used to conduct the study. A total of 246 randomly selected learners participated in the study. The statistical package for social sciences, version 22, was used to analyse the data. Although no statistical significance association was found between gender, age or the grade of learner and substance abuse at school, at p< 05 using the Parson's Correlation test, it emerged that learner substance abuse at school was arbitrarily high (17.14%). It was concluded that learner substance abuse at schools in the Buffalo Flats area is neither gender-, agenor grade-dependent.
Human Sciences Research Council (Sat,) studied this question.